The Politics of Trauma

MICHAEL HUMPHREY*

My subject, the politics of trauma, touches on a wide range of issues

that have been part of my research agenda for some time. The
trajectory of my research interests has taken me to a lot of places that
have experienced political crisis and large-scale violence. They have
included popular religious culture in North West Frontier Province in
Pakistan, dispute regulation amongst Lebanese Muslim immigrants
coming from the civil war, political Islam in Lebanon, the truth politics
of transition and human rights in post-apartheid South Africa, and
(with my wife Estela Valverde) post-dictatorship in Argentina and
Uruguay, and the role of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia (lCTY) in post-conflict Bosnia. This lecture will
focus on the politics of trauma in this context of political transition.
A couple of weeks ago I was attending a conference on Human
Rights and Democratisation in Buenos Aires. I was in a taxi with
my wife and two other conference participants, one of whom was a
very well-known member of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Nora
Morales de Cortmas. We said to the taxi driver, 'Do you realize you
are driving one of the Mothers to dinner?' He was absolutely thrilled
and immediately asked her: 'I had an uncle who disappeared in 1959,
have you been able to identify all the remains of people you have
found?' The Mothers' campaign to find out what had happened to
the Disappeared referred to the repression of 1976-1983, not to the
victims of earlier dictatorships. What was the taxi driver imagining,
that the bones of victims of state repression were stacked in layers

* Michael Humphrey holds the Chair of Sociology and is Chair of the D"Partment
of Sociology and Social Po/icy, University of Sydney. This inauguralleeture was
given to the Arts Association on 15 April 2010.

37
\",ailing to be identified? For me, his question conjured up an image
of an Argentina haunted by the Disappeared of many violent events
stretching back into the past. For him, the Mothers represented a
source of truth. They had managed to unmask the truth about what
had happened to the 30,000 persons who disappeared and now
they were identifying their remains. His question effectively handed
the Mothers the historical role of exhuming the entire past of state
repression in Argentina. He went on to reveal an even longer family
hbtory of the experience of repression, dating back to the Second
World War in the Soviet Union. He was originally from a German
colony in the Caucasus and his family had been transported to
Kazakhstan when the German army invaded in 1941. His family had
arrived in Argentina as refugees from the Soviet Union. His family's
memory had never entered the collective memory, the memory of
the state.
The idea of trauma has become a key theme in contemporary
politics because of the way it brings violence to the surface of history.
Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman refer to the 'age of anxiety'. 1
History is less concemed with heroes but has become more interested
in the history of victims. The comments of the former Australian Prime
Minister John Howard on the balance between the heroic versus
victim version of Australian history highlight the shift. He criticised
the 'black armband version of history' as focusing on the victims
of colonisation instead of celebrating the achievements of British
settlement. A similar criticism has been made of the new national
secondary school history curriculum as being too heavily focussed
on indigenous Australian aboriginal history. Our focus on the
victims rather than the victors, Fassin and Rechtman suggest, has
changed our relationship to history; it has tumed tragic. 2
Trauma is not just a bodily experience; it refers to an underlying
traumatic event. Clinical psychology constructs trauma as a symptom
of a disturbing experience which has not been psychologically digested,
an event which is unassimilable as memory, and overthrows temporal
sequence by collapsing the past into the present. Psychologically
this became known as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) and
originally was viewed as a symptom of bodily weakness. PTSD was

38
identified as a syndrome only during the Vietnam war (although
references to shell shock from the First World War indicate military
medicine has been aware of the psychological distress caused by
combat for some time). But trauma has undergone an historical shift
from clinical to public recognition. Trauma is no longer simply a
medical condition recognized by professionals and clinicians but an
expression of our humanity, able to be recognized by the public. The
victim is seen to embody our humanity.
It is in the name of this vestige of humanity that compensation is
demanded for damage suffered, that witnesses testify against all forms
of oppression, and that proofs of cruelty endured are brought forward.3
The traumatic event becomes culturally emblematic as collective
memory, framing what values are important and what is politically
and morally at stake. John Howard's strong identification with
September 11, and the fact that he was visiting the US at the time, led
him to refer to the Bali bombings as our 'September 11', as if we needed
such an awesome and catastrophic event to define or sharpen our
sense of national identity. These large emblematic traumatic events
are also a moment for public mobilisation and identification, bringing
people together. This is occurring nationally but also transnationally.
Trauma relates to the experience of violence and traces of violence
in the body. There is a whole industry of professionals that has grown
up around making trauma visible, making victims visible to others
and making victims conscious of themselves as victims. The media
playa big role in making victims visible and generating discourses of
victimhood. Trauma can now quickly shift from being an existential
experience to an identity, to victimhood. People are made conscious
of their victimhood through identification with other victims. The
human rights discourse can reinforce victimhood by constructing the
subject position of victim in opposition to the perpetrator.
Trauma has become a source of legitimacy derived from the
authenticity of suffering, the truth of personal testimony and, as
Paul Ricoeur argues, an expression of the affective roots of injustice. 4
Trauma is no longer seen as a sign of weakness but as a sign of
resilience. Victims demand legal reparation in the name of unjust
suffering. They seek moral recognition for their suffering. Their bodies

39
become the source of proof. Trauma is expressed on the basis of a
shared humanity based in human rights and suffering. It becomes a
:,uurce of political visibility in the sense that the victim is constmcted
as the product of a particular event. Trauma is the lens through
which other legal and moral claims are made. It frames violence and
interprets its effects.
This paper argues that violence is made visible in the victim
through the combination of two lenses, the trauma lens and human
rights lens, serving as universalizing discourses and creating the
basis for formal equality. The trauma lens is universalizing based
on our shared experience of the body as a source of suffering and
pain; the human rights lens is universalizing based on our shared
humanity. Suffering produces the possibility of moral recognition,
rights produce the possibility of everyone being included in the same
community. However, while the trauma lens is universalizing through
the shared ontology of the body, it is also a moral vision and is used
to determine who has rights. In other words, it is a moral vision that
selects who deserves to be recognised. The trauma lens creates the
possibility of recognition and at the same time produces a moral
economy to determine who is deserving - for example, the innocent
victim as most deserving. This lecture focuses on the use of trauma
and the human rights lens as universalizing discourses in situations
of political transition from repression or internal conflict to democratic
politics. I will explore the tmth commission, an institution promoted
to manage the legacies of conflict by the transitional justice industry,
and briefly consider the example of refugees to demonstrate the way
the trauma lens has become a pervasive vehicle for governmentality.

Truth commissions

Tmth commissions are increasingly used to manage the legacies

of conflict in situations of political and military stalemate. They
have become part of the standard operating procedure in peace
agreements, transitional justice programs, and democratization, and
are increasingly used as a form of political triage in any situation
of political violence where impunity prevails. The South African

40
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the be~t known truth
commission, commenced in 1996 but it was not the first. There were
more than 20 earlier truth commissions in Africa and Latin Americ(I
- including one held in Rwanda in 1992 before the genocide! The
challenge of truth commissions has been to balance demands of
victims for justice and accountability with the risk prosecutions
present to political normalisation.
The suffering victim has been made the centrepiece of truth
commissions as the source of embodied truth. Suffering and testimony
give visibility to the violent crimes committed, even if the truth of who
did it remains unknown or the evidence to prove culpability is lacking.
When you put the victim at the centre you produce violence stories.
The violence story contains a plot with key elements: the weapon, the
wound and the community. The weapon refers to the perpetrator, the
wound to the victim and the community to the morality transgressed.
The meaning of the story shifts between a therapeutic and justice
perspective according to which elements of the plot prevail. The more
the violence, the weapon, is downplayed, the more the victim's rights
are diminished in favour of a therapeutic focus on needs.
Truth commissions have emphasised moral recognition of the victim
over justice. But what determines which victims are recognized? In
the TRC, victims were invited to make written submissions to the
Victims' Hearings - around 21,000 were submitted. These statements
were classified according to the gravity of the human rights violation
suffered by the victim. However, the victims of apartheid were
narrowly defined - those who had personally experienced violence,
not the much larger category of victims who had suffered from the
large-scale collective crimes of apartheid such as segregation, mass
population relocation and unequal development. Only ten per cent of
victims who submitted statements to the Victims' Hearings actually
got to give their testimonies to the Victims' Hearings in public. They
were selected on the emblematic nature of their stories which fitted
the chronology of well-known events of apartheid repression to be
investigated: some were high profile victims, but mostly female
relatives gave their testimonies - for example, the Cradock Four, the St
James Church Massacre, the Murder of Amy Biehl, the Murder of Steve

41
Biko. Individual memory contributed to the production of a collective
memory about the crimes of apartheid and the new post-apartheid
South Africa. In order to produce this consensus Bishop Tutu, the
Chair of the TRC, blurred the distinction between victims by declaring
that 'We are all victims of Apartheid'. He put aside the questions
about differential moral responsibility, what the anti-Apartheid
struggle was about, and the impact of the compromises made on
reconciliation and justice during transition between the National
Party and the African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela.
Truth commissions have been problematic because they have
selected the kind of victims who are heard and the kind of victims
who are recognised. This official construction and recognition of
the victim is a mode of governance. Power inscribed on the body
as pain is one mode of governance, as Foucault has argued;5 another
is the appropriation and definition of the meaning of pain inscribed
on the body. In other words, the state's management of political
transition has sought to determine the meaning of suffering as
part of a new national project and mode of governance. 'Private
memory' contributes to making 'collective memory' as the official
memory of the state. In this process a distinction is made between
the 'individual and the collective, between the govemmentality it
imposes on the former and the cohesion it provides for the latter'.6
The truth commission differentiates between victims and recognises
those who can contribute to producing a politically viable consensus.
The truth commission's focus on the victim implies culpability
- someone caused the trauma. However, they have diminished the
human rights lens by either neglecting the question of culpability or
generalizing it. Their reports have listed the victims but rarely the
perpetrators. This is particularly the case with the Nunca Mas (Never
Again) reports in Latin America. They investigate and report what
happened to victims but not who was responsible for the human rights
violations. Focusing on the victim, the wound, and not the weapon,
the perpetrator, they sidestep the question of responsibility. At the
same time that truth commissions blur the question of responsibility
they seek to forge a political consensus in the present about the past
for the future. The selective recognition of victims is integral to the

42
production of that consensus and to closure.
Truth politics is very much concerned with victimhood. The
terms used in relation to truth politics - justice, reconciliation, truth,
amnesty, memory, victirnhood, recognition, forgiveness, healing -
all address a moment of change, a negotiation about how we move
from where we are to somewhere else. And who is going to pay
the price? Victims often point out that they are being asked to bear
the burdens of peaceful transition - they give the testimonies, they
are asked to forgive, and they get little recognition or material
compensation. 'We pay the price and we do the work.' There is a real
imbalance between perpetrator and victim, and also the beneficiaries
(which I will return to later) in bringing about reconciliation and
closure on the past. The politics of victimhood tries to address political
violence by dealing with its effects rather than its causes.
The theme of unresolved trauma and the cost of impunity in
post-dictatorship Argentina is captured in a Personal Notice placed
in a left-wing daily in Buenos Aires, Ptigina/12, in January 2005.
The notice marks the anniversary of the disappearance of Hilda
Adriana Fernandez during the dictatorship in January 1977. The
notice informs us about her disappearance by the ironic comment
- 'visited ESMA'. ESMA refers to the infamous Naval Mechanics
School that functioned as a clandestine Detention Centre where
'death flights' took drugged (disappeared) prisoners and dumped
them from aircraft into the sea. The memorial notice states: 'When I
hear about all the things happening to youth today, I remember you'.
A list of well-known traumatic events includes: the dictatorship and
the 30,000 Disappeared; the Malvinas War (where young conscripts
needlessly died as a result of negligence); Kheyvis (a night club fire
where 17 youths died in December 1993 through negligence); Police
trigger-happy policy (police violence against adolescents, especially
in the poor suburbs); 'suicide' in police detention (police repression
in prison); Republica Cromafi6n (a nightclub fire in 2005 where 194
died and 714 were injured because of official neglect and corruption).
The notice ends, 'We don't forget or forgive. Naomi your sister.'
Political transition, the truth politics and the suspended trials had
not bought closure for many people, especially those most directly

43
affected. The memorial notice highlights continuing distrust of justice
in Argentina, continuing impunity (impunidad) and the ongoing
sacrifice of the youth of Argentina as a result of state repression and
corruption. The trauma lens is used to remind us of all the young
victims whose rights have been ignored or denied.
One of the problems with political transition in Argentina was the
political compromise forced on the Alfonsin government after the
National Commission on Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP)
which led to the prosecution and successful conviction of high profile
leaders of the dictatorship. CONADEP produced the Nunca Mas
report and awarded compensation to families of the Disappeared.
However, conflict over reconciliation and compensation split the
famous human rights organisation, the Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo.7 They divided over the issue of whether or not personal
reconciliation and acceptance of compensation and the remains
of relatives (if identified by forensic tests) amounted to a betrayal
of the cause of justice for all the Disappeared. One group, Linea
Fundadora (Founding Line), accepted compensation and focused on
memorialisation and documentation of the Disappeared. The other
group, Asociaci6n (Association), rejected reparation, demanded the
return of the Disappeared and called the other Mothers 'prostitutes'
for accepting it. They felt individual mourning and personal closure
de-politicised the Mothers and undermined the collective cause of
justice for all the Disappeared.
In the truth commission the trauma lens has been used to
produce a hierarchy of victims through selective recognition of and
compensation for those seen as most deserving. Victim recognition is
shaped by the capacity of individual stories to contribute to collective
memory, the official memory articulated in the truth commission
report. Political transition in Chile produced a hierarchy of victims
through the recognition of the victims of particular crimes and not
others. In 1990 the new democratic government launched a National
Truth and Reconciliation Commission 1990-91 (also known as
the Rettig Commission) to investigate 3,400 cases of death during
the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-90), arising from disappearances
after arrest, executions, and torture leading to death committed by

44
government agents or people in their service, as well as kidnappings
and attempts on the life of persons carried out by private citizens
for political reasons. 8 The families of the victims, constructed as
innocents, were compensated through pension, health, education,
and housing benefits. Unlike the TRC the hearings were brief and
not held in public. It was not until 2005, fourteen years later, that
the National Commission on Imprisonment and Torture (2004-05)
could investigate crimes against political prisoners. The first part of
the report was released in 2004, the second part was finished in 2005
and was classified as secret and not to be opened for 50 years. The
report was based on 28,459 testimonies, and the state granted lifelong
pensions and health benefits to victims.
Coming out of the slow-paced truth politics of Colombia is
the 'Victims' Rights Act', passed in June 2009. The law has been
strongly criticised by national human rights organizations, Amnesty
International and the UN High Commissioner Navanethem Pillay
for discriminating between victims of paramilitary group violence
and victims of state violence. Under this law victims of illegal
armed groups can apply for compensation through administrative
procedures while victims of state violence can only be compensated
after proving before a judge that a State official committed the crime.9
The law establishes a clear hierarchy of victims based on impunity for
agents of the state. It also limits the period of claims for victims and
closes off claims for compensation from future human rights violations
and ignores the illegal gains of violence - for example, the restitution
of millions of hectares stolen by paramilitary groups, especially
from indigenous populations. The law, the government announced,
provided compensation for the victims out of solidarity, not justice.
Here the trauma lens is used to justify selective compensation where
the human rights lens addressing legal responsibility is put aside.
The trauma lens circumscribes the scope of human rights
investigations and selectively determines which victims' testimonies
will contribute to collective memory. During political transition, truth
commissions have become a recommended ingredient in the recipe for
democratisation by lending legitimacy to the successor state. But truth
commissions have not brought closure on the past so much as served

45
as vehicles for producing a political consensus through the victims.
The political problem is that this consensus does not necessarily
endure. Major cleavages emerge between victims/families of the
victims and the rest of society not so directly affected by the violence
over the continued pursuit of accountability and justice. Victims'
groups also divide over their post-repression human rights goals, as
in the case of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In fact the engine of
human rights politics and continuing demands for accountability is
the politics of victimhood - the victims and their families. Because
truth commissions have generally not led to trials but usually to
degrees of amnesty, demands for redistributive justice, especially the
idea that the beneficiaries of the previous injustice should contribute,
stand little chance of success.
With growing distance from events the trauma lens loses its
capacity to mobilise support for human rights abuses. For example,
the persistence of the amnesty law in Uruguay can be understood
as the weakening of the trauma lens. The case of Uruguay points
to contradictions between the legitimacy of law and the authority
of democratic processes. The return of democracy in Uruguay
was the result of a negotiated agreement (Naval Club Agreement
1984) between the key political parties and the military leadership.
Amnesty was part of that agreement, at first for the political prisoners
- around 20-25 per cent of the population was imprisoned at some
period during the dictatorship - and soon after, a reciprocal amnesty
was legislated by the new democratic government under President
Sanguinetti in 1986 to protect the military. 10 Interestingly, the amnesty
law has been democratically ratified by referendum twice: in 1989
and 2009 a campaign to annul the law failed, receiving 43 per cent
and 47 per cent of votes respectively. Moreover, both conservative
and left-wing governments have left the amnesty law on the books
until today because of the electoral risk it was seen to represent. In
1989 reciprocal amnesty, fear of the past returning and fear of the
consequences of exploring the past defeated the campaign to annul
the law. In 2009 the campaign to annul the amnesty law, driven again
by the victims of repression, was defeated by a combination of the
younger generation's disconnection from past violence, which the

46
state had not publicly investigated or reconciled, and the preference
of a large section of society to leave the past alone. As Jose Miguel
Vivanco, America's director at Human Rights Watch, said in response
to the loss of the plebiscite - 'accountability is not a popularity contest
that should be decided by majorities'.ll Amnesty as political consensus
has prevailed in Uruguay, resulting in public closure of the past and
the neglect of a collective memory about the political meaning of
the dictatorship and repression. Nevertheless, judicial activism led
to the prosecution, on a case by case basis, of some key leaders - for
example, the successful prosecution of de facto president Juan Maria
Bordaberry and his foreign minister, Juan Carlos Blanco. 12
Addressing past violence through the trauma and human rights
lenses does not usually get to the heart of the conflict. To look at
dictatorship and repression as an issue of suffering and human rights
violation severely limits the possibility of understanding the origins
of conflict and political violence. Thus the story of the Disappeared in
Argentina is not just one of human rights violations but the product
of the history of the role of the military in power, the emergence of
revolutionary movements to challenge corrupt politicians and state
power, and the impact of Cold War politics. In transitional justice
politics, the causes and origins of the conflict often get lost or become
concealed because they are too hard to deal with.
Robert Meister argues that the underlying pattern of conflict in
the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century is divided
between the politics of resentment and the politics of grievance. 13
He identifies two perspectives on past conflict in political transition:
the revolutionary perspective and the counter-revolutionary
perspective. The revolutionary perspective is about removing the
regime in power, prosecuting the perpetrators and also overturning
the social privilege of the beneficiaries of past injustice. This ongoing
revolutionary pursuit of criminal justice and redistributive justice is
precisely what the truth politics have sought to avoid by recognising
victims and reassuring the beneficiaries of injustice that they will
not become the targets of revenge. The truth politics of transition
condemns violence, and democratic process renders it illegitimate.
Meister calls this the politics of counter-revolution, or the politics

47
of resentment, which seeks to balance the fear of the beneficiaries
of injustice and the desire of the victims for revenge. When in 1986
the leading Argentine generals of the dictatorship were brought to
trial they felt betrayed by the public and singled out as 'scapegoats'.
From their perspective much of the Argentine public had accepted
the dictatorship's National Security doctrine and looked away from
the effects of the policy of state terror through mass disappearance.
Their support for the regime was captured in the common submissive
response to reports of disappearance during the dictatorship, alga
habran hecha (they must have done something!).
The politics of transition creates the categories of perpetrators,
victims and beneficiaries of injustice. It seeks to persuade the
beneficiaries of injustice - those who accepted, supported or colluded
with the repression - to embrace democratic politics and support
the new regime. The fear of the beneficiaries is that their moral
recognition of the victims (your suffering was wrong) is not enough
for the victims who continue to want justice, not just the recognition
of their injuries and suffering. Transitional justice becomes a 'just
enough' project, not too much and not too little, in order not to upset
the process of democratisation by provoking a reactionary backlash.
Meister's insight is that the underlying issues of the conflict remain
unresolved within the human rights and transitional justice approach.
In the politics of transition, amnesty laws sideline the trauma
and human rights lenses by preventing accountability and public
contestation over collective memory. Eventually, victims succeed
little-by-little in gaining recognition of their trauma, and contest
public memory through the right to know - truth telling and, if
possible, accountability through the courts. However, amnesty laws
can delay the process of opening up history to public scrutiny across
generations. The Spanish case reveals the profound impact amnesty
laws can have on preventing historical reconciliation.
In Spain the Amnesty Law 1977 imposed the 'don't ask, don't tell'
solution on the transition to democracy after Franco's death. The
Amnesty Law granted an 'equitable impunity' to political prisoners
and to the military and security forces. Ricard Vinyes describes its
design as an 'amnesty of all for all, a forgetting of all for all, a profound

48
erasure designed to touch everyone an.d the whole sociely'.14 What
has brought the issue of the crimes of the Franco regime to the
political surface is the Law of Historical Memory. This law, passed
in 2007, opened up the possibility of exploring the truth of the past
by establishing the right of victims / families of victims to know what
happened. The Law challenges the collective memory, what Ricard
Vinyes calls Ia buena memoria (the 'good memory')15 that ensured
conflicting memories remained private and subordinated to the
production of public memory, the memory of the state. The civil war
was historically digested in other terms - it was 'a fratricidal tragedy'
or the result of 'difficult modernization and democratic failure'.16
The Law of Historical Memory was the political outcome of a
grassroots movement around local exhumations of mass graves,
drawing on local knowledge about past atrocities. It began to
organise with the formation of the Association for the Recuperation
of Historical Memory by a journalist, Emilio Silva Barrera, whose
grandfather was a victim of Falangist violence in 1936,17 The
movement disinterred graves to try to identify the remains using DNA
techniques. The impetus to recognise victims of the civil war, however,
had begun much earlier. Since governments could not pass laws
addressing Republican victims of Franco's repression directly, they
did so indirectly through administrative reparations. The Republican
victim was recognised as an object of bodily suffering entitled to
financial compensation. Between 1977 and 2007, laws, ordinances
and decrees step-by-step expanded the categories for financial
compensation - for example, Law 5/1979 awarded pensions, medical
assistance and pharmaceutical benefits to the children and families
of victims of the civil war.18 Successive governments, however,
never managed to address the issue of financial compensation head on
once and for all. Economic reparation was individual and symbolic,
and never managed to broach the larger questions of political or
moral reparations.
The Law of Historical Memory represented a major break coming
out of a victims' rights movement. It was a law for moral reparations,
for reconstruction of personal and family memory and personal family
of the victims. Its purpose was purely testimonial: to reveal what

49
happened, where it happened and who did what to whom. However,
in October 2008 prosecutor Baltasar Garzon extended the scope of the
law by launching investigations into 114,266 cases of disappearance
that occurred between 1936 and 1952 and ordered the exhumation
of nineteen mass graves. 19 Right-wing opponents accused him of
being one-sided, investigating only the crimes against Republicans,
not the crimes of Republicans - for example, the murders of priests
and nuns - and, more importantly, reaching beyond his judicial
authority. His initiative to investigate the Franco regime's 'crimes
against humanity' provoked a right-wing reaction which resulted
in his prosecution for exceeding his judicial authority and, as a
consequence, being suspended from the Audiencia Nacional (Central
Criminal Court). Politically his actions represented a challenge to
the whole transitional process based on amnesty and amnesia. The
paradoxical twist was that, in response to these charges, the Argentine
government, in solidarity with Garzon, would itself investigate
the crimes against humanity committed by the Franco regime.
Garzon had previously challenged the Amnesty law in Argentina
by successfully prosecuting two Argentine military officers in
Spanish courts for crimes against humanity. As a reciprocal gesture
the Argentine government was now investigating the crimes of
dictatorship in Spain.
The moral economies of trauma obscure the conflict behind the
human rights lens. They fail to address the questions of why the
violence occurred; what is the social and political context; in what
way is it shaped by broader political issues? What the trauma lens
does is to choose its victims on a moral basis of who is deserving. So
why does this selectivity happen? The issue of urban insecurity in
Buenos Aires highlights the political contradictions that can be hidden
in popular solidarity around trauma and victims rights. In March
2004 Axel Blumberg, a 23-year-old engineering student, was abducted
for ransom in Buenos Aires. A few days later he was murdered. His
father, Juan Carlos Blumberg, organised an enormous street protest for
victim's rights against urban crime and insecurity, mobilizing massive
support from across the social spectrum. But Blumberg'S solution to
tackle urban crime involved the criminalisation and repression of

50
the urban poor - zero tolerance, preventive detention on the basis
of suspicion - aimed at many of the very people who had marched
with him against impunity and for victims' rights. The trauma lens
produces the possibility of consensus around the shared recognition of
a site in the suffering body but this does not usually mean connecting
with the subjectivity and feelings of victims. The consensus is forged
around symbolic events and through ritualised ideas about the duty
to remember. There is often only a fairly shallow connection to the
trauma of victims with solidarity forged around pity more than
identification, or moral consensus around what wrong was done.

Refugees

The victim of political persecution has confronted increasing

restrictions to the protection provided by the international UN
Refugee Convention 1951, a widely ratified convention upholding the
right to seek asylum. The inclusive human rights lens for protection
is being undermined by a shrinking trauma lens, which is more and
more suspicious of the authenticity of victims' suffering. Australian
immigration and refugee policy has for a decade enacted policy
designed to limit the ability of individual asylum seekers to be seen
or heard in the legal system and in the court of Australian public
opinion. Government policy on illegal boat arrivals has shaped the
way asylum seekers have been criminalised as illegal entrants using
people smugglers, has created the temporary protection visa as an
in-between status and has excised the Australian migration zone
to force refugee processing and assessment off-shore. The Labor
Party's recent suspension of the processing of asylum claims of boat
arrivals from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka for six months continues
the same strategy of curtailing the protection provided by the
Refugee Convention. Australian policy circumscribes rights as well
as the sympathy and compassion we feel towards asylum seekers.
It effectively silences victims by making their trauma invisible to
the Australian public and courts through playing on fear and
xenophobia in the Australian electorate.
Proof of persecution has always been problematic. The narrative

51
of persecution is a story of violence. 1£ the story is not believed then
wounds are more closely examined. Didier Fassin highlights the way
that in France proof of the scar - in the form of the medical certificate
- has become an important source of truth and legitimation. As the
narrative truth is increasingly doubted there is a resort to an embodied
truth in physical and psychological scars and for the certification of
trauma as a medical fact.
Asylum claims represent another example of where trauma and
rights are brought to bear on recognising and entitling the victim.
However, trauma becomes the basis for calibrating suffering and
creating a hierarchy of victims in order to limit the number who
are recognised as entitled to refugee status - i.e., fit the category of
legitimate victim. So victims get marginalised if their stories don't
resonate as truthful or they don't seem to belong, or they belong to
the wrong category, or they can't prove the truth of trauma in their
body. In addition, denying one person the truth of his or her asylum
claim can have a consequence of denying the history of a whole group
of people. So by talking about the arrival of boats from Sri Lanka in
terms of the effectiveness of border control policies as an effective
deterrent, in effect denies the truth of the nature of long-term war
between the Sri Lankan government and Tamils. The justification for
suspending the processing of asylum applications of boat arrivals
now is that the political conditions in Sri Lanka and in Afghanistan
have improved - the end of war in the former and the surge to defeat
the Taliban in the latter. So the conflict, the basis of their claims for
protection and source of their trauma, is declared invalid as grounds
for granting protection.
My main point here is that trauma, which has not been sufficiently
recognised as universalising discourse, and the human rights
discourse are both potentially inclusive but become the basis for
differentiation or the division of people. The traumatic event is
apparently made accessible to others through the subjectivity, memory
and feelings of the victim. However, while victims speak on the
basis of their experience they are heard through a filtering moral
economy of trauma. Victims' testimony becomes enmeshed in forms
of governance and governmentality. In other words, the construction

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of the victim, the conceptualisation of the events, the validity of the
memory and the moral criteria of recognition circumscribe what is
heard rather than proceeding on the basis of the universal recognition
of suffering or rights.

Notes

1 Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into

the Condition of Victimhood, Princeton and Oxford, 2UUY.
2 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, p. 275.
3 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, p. 97.
4 Paul RicoeuT, The Just, Chicago, 2000.
5 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, New York, 1977.
6 Fassin and Rechtman, Empire of Trauma, p. 283.
7 Fernando J. Bosco, 'Human Rights Politics and Scaled Performances of
Memory: Conflicts among the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina',
Social & Cultural Geography 5.3 (2004): 381-402.
8 Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity,
New York, 200l.
9 'Colombia's "Victims Law" is Discriminatory', Amnesty International, 25
November 2008. International Refugee Convention 1951 URL http://
www.amnesty.org/en/ news-and-updates/newsl colombia-victims-law-
discriminatory-20081125 (accessed 12 April 2010).
10 Louise Mallinder, 'Uruguay's Evolving Experience of Amnesty and
Civil Society's Response', Institute of Transitional Justice, Ulster
University, 2009, http://papers.ssm.com/soI3/ papers.cfm?abstract_
id=1387362&download=yes (accessed 15 June 2010).
11 Ekaterina Sivolobova, 'Uruguay: Approaches to the Expiry Law', The Jurist,
10 June 2010, http://jurist.org/dateline/2010/06/uruguay-approaches-
to-the-expiry-law.php (accessed 12 June 2010).
12 'Uruguay: E-President Faces Prosecution for Military-Era Abuses', Human
Rights Watch, May 19 2005, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2005/05/19/
uruguay-ex-president-faces-prosecution-rnilitary-era-abuses (accessed 12
April 2010).
13 Robert Meister, 'Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood', Ethics
and International Affairs 16.2 (2002): 91-108.
14 Ricard Vinyes, 'La memoria del estado', in R. Vinyes, ed., El estado y la
memoria: gobiernos y cilldadanos frente a los trail mas de la historia, Barcelona,
2009, 23-66, p. 30.
15 Vinyes, 'La memoria del estado', p. 25.
16 Carolyn P. Boyd, 'The Politics of History and Memory in Democratic

53
 Spain', The Allnals of the Americall Academy of Political and Social ScieHce
617 (200S): 133-4S.
17 Boyd, 'The Politics of History and Memory', p. 143.
IS Vinyes, 'La memoria del estado', p. 42.
19 'Judge Orders Investigation of Executions in Franco Era', The New York
Times, October 16, 200S, http://www.nytimes.com/200S/10/17 /world /
europe/17spain,html?_r=1 (accessed 12 June 2010).

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